Gentle Reader: These are my thoughts and experiences, while you may make the point that not everyone is as lazy as I am, please don’t make a big thing about it, I don’t want everyone else to know!
While doing some research for a previous article about corn, it occurred to me that one of the confounding factors when designing sustainability (or anything else for that matter) into your garden, home or life in general is convenience. That is to say, if you are making changes to your aforementioned garden, home or life to achieve a greater level of sustainability, is the change going to be more or less convenient to carry out than the status quo?
If the change is less convenient than what you are doing now, it is much less likely that you will keep going with it. I’m not saying you won’t keep it going but the odds are greater you will return to doing things the original way if the convenience factor is low.
For example – When I first found out about hay box (stored heat) cooking I wanted to make a hay box cooker, but wanted to do it cheaply. I bought a large, but fairly disreputable looking esky for $5 from a garage sale and turned it into a hay box cooker. It was very efficient and worked well, but because it didn’t look the best (despite my best attempts to tart it up) it spent most of its time in the shed where it was inconvenient to get to, thus it rarely got used. I still wanted a hay box, but it had to look good enough so that it could stay inside the house, so I bought a large ottoman and turned it into hay box cooker. Due to the fact that it looks like a piece of furniture, it sits inside the house, near our front door and close to the kitchen and gets used regularly.
Also - I made a strawberry tower out of a blue 200 litre drum by cutting some holes in the sides and filling it with growing medium. The most appropriate place for it (ie where it would fit) was near our north east boundary in the front yard. The downside of it was that it is not an area I normally visit on a regular basis, meaning I had to go out of my way to get there. So in the end it did not get the level of attention required for it to be truly productive. Now (having learned the lesson) I am preparing a space for it beside our back steps, where it is next to a main thoroghfare.
Getting back to the corn. We have a number of ways of getting hold of it with varying degrees of “sustainability” and the two most ethical suppliers are both 30 minutes’ drive away. While I am committed to these options, the jury is still out on how much back sliding there will be because two of the other options are a lot more local (within walking distance) and therefore much more convenient!
The idea of making things convenient is built into the Permaculture concept of Zones in that the elements of your design you will most often need to access should be in zone 1 – closest to the house or even in the house itself (zone 0) so that they are easiest to get to when needed ie they are most conveniently located.
I personally had an introduction into the idea from working with a number of large Australian companies for over 20 years in the field of OHS (or WHS as it is now called). We were dealing with the capacity for people to be badly injured or killed, but if a change to plant or process was introduced which was less convenient that the original, the odds were it would be discarded by the time we had walked out of the site. This was often a challenge, but if you could design a change which saved the operator time or effort (ie it was more convenient), they were on your side and the change had a much greater chance of sticking.
So – whadda ya do about it?
Obviously the first thing to do is be aware of it! If you understand that an answer to a problem or a new plan element which increases convenience will be more likely to be used, then looking at your plans and answers through the lens of convenience can be very helpful.
Second, deliberately favouring new technology or design elements which are more convenient to use but still improve your sustainability will score points with the family or others who live in your space. For example, we have a rocket stove which we use outside to cook with, but this is not so convenient in hot weather so we use the gas stove, which uses non-renewable fuel. Although just recently we have bought a highly efficient induction cooker which can be used inside but also makes use of excess electricity from the solar set up, which occurs during high sun/hot weather times. So it is more sustainable (in its energy usage) than the gas stove, but also more convenient to use than the rocket stove. Needless to say it is getting a work out!
So while you are still in the planning stage of a new endeavour, particularly if it is sustainability related, look at your plans through the lens of convenience and see if you can make things easier for yourself and your family, that way your improvements are much more likely to be successful!
